The Persistence of Memory (La persistencia de la memoria) (1931) is a trifecta of superlatives: Surrealism’s most famous painting, created by its most famous artist, featuring its most famous motif. The painter, of course, is Salvador Dalí, and his iconic rendering of melted pocket watches is instantly recognizable to nearly everyone, even those with little or no interest in art.

Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory when he was 28. By that time, he was already a well-established member of the Surrealist circle, having moved to their base of operation in Paris five years earlier. His reputation preceded his arrival thanks to his fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró, a Surrealist OG whose work inspired Dalí’s own. Miró introduced Dalí to André Breton, Surrealism’s founder and ideological enforcer, who welcomed Dalí into the movement—though in time, the latter’s penchant for flamboyance and self-promotion, as well as his sympathy for fascism, would lead to a very public rupture with Breton.

Nevertheless, The Persistence of Memory, and Dalí’s work in general, represented the epitome of Breton’s call to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Moreover, Dalí’s thinking, like Breton’s, was deeply indebted to the writings of Sigmund Freud and his belief that the mind could be unlocked through psychoanalytical methods such as the interpretation of dreams.

Dalí added his own peculiar twists to Surrealist ideology as well. For example, when artists of varying stripe began to flock to Breton’s movement, he enlisted Dalí’s aid in coming up with a way of making art that could conceivably span the panoply of styles and aims sheltering under the Surrealist umbrella. As a response, Dalí offered the “Surrealist object,” a psychosexual spin, essentially, on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade strategy of taking ordinary, functional items—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack—out of their original mass-produced context and labeling them unique works of art. But instead of puckishly violating the boundaries between art and life or between high and low culture, as Duchamp did, Surrealist objects would dredge up repressed thoughts and feelings. Dalí based the idea on Freud’s theory of fetishism, which explored the erotic fixation on shoes and other items associated with particular body parts. (Dalí’s own contributions in this regard included 1938’s Lobster Telephone, a handset sheathed in a crustacean carapace.)

More relevantly for The Persistence of Memory, though, was another concept Dalí formulated the year before he painted it, which he called the “paranoiac critical” method. Based on the notion that paranoiacs perceive things that aren’t there, Dalí’s “method” secreted phantom pictures within his compositions as a kind of stream-of-consciousness Rorschach test for viewers. Dalí called this strategy a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” In other words, Dalí was asserting that insanity provided him a model for pictorial organization—though, as he drily noted, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”

For his part, Breton embraced the paranoiac critical as an “instrument of primary importance”—until he didn’t: In 1939, after Dalí expressed his admiration for Hitler (saying, for example, that he often dreamed of the fürher as a woman whose “flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me”), Breton finally managed to engineer Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, something he’d tried and failed to do in 1934 after Dalí threw his support to the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He accused Dalí of espousing race war and denounced the paranoiac critical method as reactionary.

The Persistence of Memory was first exhibited in 1932 in a group show of Surrealist art at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Levy had acquired the painting on a trip to Paris, and it immediately became a media sensation—the first for a work of art in New York, perhaps, since Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase rocked the Armory Show in 1913. It entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art two years later.

Dalí’s approach was notable for its almost hyperrealistic attention to detail, all with the aim of creating “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he put it. His otherworldly precisionism owed a lot to the polished biomorphic abstractions of fellow Surrealist Yves Tanguy, so much so that Dalí allegedly told Tanguy’s niece, “I pinched everything from your uncle.”

Dalí’s composition is, above all, a landscape that references geographic landmarks recalling his childhood in his native Catalonia, including Cap de Creus, a peninsula near Spain’s northeastern border with France, and Puig Pení, a mountain in the same region. Both take up the scene’s background, while its foreground is dominated by an ectoplasmic turkey-necked form that many take as a hidden self-portrait in profile. But it was also modeled after an anthropomorphic rock within Hieronymus Bosch’s dizzying medieval masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Much of Bosch’s works provided a template for Dalí.)

As for the liquefying timepieces, there are three in all, draped respectively across the aforementioned figure, the branch of a barren tree to its left, and an oblong box or bench jutting in sharply from the left border of the work to serve as a pedestal of sorts for the tree. A fourth pocket watch is also perched there, limned in orange, and though its shape is solid, it features ants converging in radiating lines toward a hole in the middle.

By Dalí’s own admission, ants represent his obsession with decay, but the melting watches have proved a bit more resistant to interpretation. Obviously they evoke time, though some have also suggested a connection to Einstein’s theory of relativity. For his part, Dalí described the watches as the “camembert of time and space,” as he’d gotten the idea for them by observing a plate of the cheese softening in the sun.

As with all things Dalí, including the maestro himself, The Persistence of Memory remains something of a mystery but is no less indelible for it. Indeed, one could almost say that Dalí’s title is a self-fulfilling prophecy as the painting tenaciously holds a place in our collective storehouse of imagery to this day.

The business cards that Mary Reynolds had made were in all capital letters and simply read: MARY REYNOLDS / RELIURE / 24 R. HALLÉ / PARIS XIV. It’s unclear why she wanted them, since her reliure (French for “bookbinding”) was mostly for herself. The address was semi-accurate. Reynolds had a place there but also lived down the street, in a two-story house at 14 rue Hallé with a big enough backyard to accommodate Brancusi sculptures, a gang of cats, and nightly gatherings of Surrealists.

Oh, and on most days her partner, Marcel Duchamp, was there too. They decorated 14 rue Hallé together with an odd collection of road maps, dangly earrings, pieces of glass, and string. She was “a great figure in her modest ways,” Duchamp would later say about the woman he was involved with for more than 20 years, on and off, and who witnessed the blossoming of the arts during the interwar period in Paris and followed her own creative path.

From the moment Reynolds (1891–1950) moved from New York to Paris in 1921, the eccentric Américaine surrounded herself with artists and writers. This wasn’t the type of company she’d kept as a straitlaced kid growing up in Minneapolis. Reynolds must have always craved something else, though, since she went to college at Vassar and then moved to Greenwich Village with her husband to be part of the scene. Their bohemian lifestyle was cut short when he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I and died of pneumonia while stationed in France. Her husband’s body never returned home for burial; instead, Reynolds crossed the Atlantic to be nearer to his spirit—and then never left.

Gentle and generous, and evidently not shy, Reynolds made friends quickly. One of them was a fellow expat who landed in Paris just a few months before she did, photographer Man Ray. “She was a sort of fairy godmother, receiving all who came to her,” he wrote in his autobiography. Not all of her new pals had the purest of intentions, though. “She was imposed on a good deal and solicited for aid.” Maybe because she could afford not to work, people thought Reynolds was a deep-pocketed socialite; in fact, she made do with a war widow pension and a small trust set up by her parents.

“She was the only person in Bohemia with any money, and yet she was always broke because she lent it or gave it all away the minute it arrived from America,” wrote another close friend, art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim and Reynolds met in Paris in the early 1920s and traveled together to places like Egypt (where they both collected unusual earrings).

Reynolds’s friends were ever present in her home, and her walls were covered with their artworks. Among other things, the house at 14 rue Hallé held a Jean Arp relief, an Alexander Calder mobile, and scenes by Yves Tanguy.

One of the many artists Reynolds hosted, and soon the subject of “Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds,” an exhibition curated by Caitlin Haskell with Tamar Kharatishvili and Alivé Piliado at the Art Institute of Chicago, was Frida Kahlo. When Kahlo made her first and only trip to Paris, in 1939, she and Reynolds hit it off immediately—so much so, that when Kahlo contracted a debilitating kidney infection, Reynolds offered her a room at her house and helped nurse her back to health (Kahlo stayed for a whole month).

“She is a really nice person and doesn’t have anything to do with the stinking ‘artists’ of the group of [André] Breton,” Kahlo said of Reynolds in a letter to her lover, photographer Nickolas Muray. “She is very kind to me and takes care of me wonderfully.” The fondness was mutual. In a letter that Reynolds sent Kahlo just after she left, she wrote, “The house is still and doesn’t know itself. Every single thing misses you tremendously.”

Reynolds had a gift for cultivating a cultural community, but by the late 1920s she wanted a creative outlet of her own. She decided to learn the art of bookbinding, a fashionable craft for women at the time. In 1929 Reynolds spent a year studying at the atelier of bookbinder Pierre Legrain, who taught her basic skills and how to incorporate patterns, animal skins, and prints.

By the time she left Legrain’s atelier, Reynolds could make avant-garde reliures of her own. “She produced a number of very original bindings, completely divorced from the classical teachings and marked by a decidedly surrealistic approach and an unpredictable fantasy,” Duchamp later wrote. She focused on Dada and Surrealist publications written by her friends, keeping materials such as mechanical presses and special leathers at home.

She used bizarre materials that connected to the texts themselves, transforming books into singular objects. Some of the connections were obvious. For a collection of poems written by Paul Éluard and illustrated with Man Ray drawings, Les mains libres (Free Hands, 1937), Reynolds created a visual pun by attaching gloves on the front and back covers (thereby “freeing” the reader’s hands). Others were harder to decipher, their meanings clear only after reading the texts.

Nearly a quarter of the texts that Reynolds bound were by Jean Cocteau, a good friend, and she branded them with his signature star on book spines, covers, and endpapers. Reynolds also bound 12 works by her friend the experimental writer Raymond Queneau. She attached a broken thermometer stuck at the freezing point to the spine of Queneau’s Un rude hiver (A Hard Winter, 1939). One of her final bookbinding projects was for Queneau’s Saint Glinglin (1948), where she secured a porcelain teacup handle to the spine in reference to a scene in which dishes were smashed at a festival.

Reynolds and Duchamp also collaborated in these years, making boxes and bindings together. The first project they joined forces on was a binding that Duchamp designed and Reynolds executed for Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896)—the front and back covers were cut to form U’s, and a B is imprinted on the spine so that the cover reads “Ubu” when open. In turn, Reynolds’s knowledge of bookbinding and leatherwork probably impacted Duchamp’s Boîtes-en-valise, boxed sets of mini reproductions of his works.

This decade-long period of collaboration and bookbinding was cut short by World War II and the German invasion of Paris. In 1941 Duchamp got a permit to leave the city, but Reynolds insisted on staying and joined the French Resistance with friends such as Samuel Beckett (her code name was Douce Mary, meaning “Gentle Mary”). “The fact that so much misery exists is sometimes overwhelming,” Reynolds wrote that year in a letter to her brother in Chicago, who was worried about her safety.

Reynolds remained in Paris well into the war, at personal risk, growing her own vegetables and providing refuge to people fleeing Nazi persecution. “She hid me in her house in Paris for 10 days, after I had escaped from a German prisoners’ camp,” wrote one of the artists she helped, Jean Hélion. “She herself was under police supervision, and she was then running a serious risk. So charming, lovely, and alive, and brave.”

By the spring of 1942 Reynolds learned that 14 rue Hallé was being watched by the Gestapo, and in September she illegally crossed the Line of Occupation and escaped to New York via a long, dangerous route that included walking across the Pyrenees mountains. The Parisian correspondent of the New Yorker, Janet Flanner, wrote about Reynolds’s escape (with some fictionalization) in a three-part story called “The Escape of Mrs. Jefferies.”

Reynolds stayed in New York but returned to Paris as soon as she could, just six weeks after hostilities ended in 1945. Duchamp did not (although he bounced between Paris and New York a bit), having entered into an affair two years earlier with Brazilian sculptor Maria Martens.

A few years later Reynold’s health started to decline, and by 1950 she discovered that she had advanced cancer. Her brother, Frank Brookes Hubachek, funded Duchamp’s travel to Paris so he could be with her. Reynolds slipped into a coma just days after Duchamp arrived and died at home at 14 rue Hallé with Duchamp by her side.

After her death, Duchamp helped find a home for her library. Special books that Reynolds had bound were given to their authors in remembrance of her, but everything else stayed together as the Mary Reynolds Collection and was gifted to the Art Institute of Chicago (where her brother was a trustee). This trove of Surrealist materials holds around 500 books, albums, magazines, exhibition catalogues, pamphlets (including ephemera that could have otherwise easily have been lost), and roughly 70 of the books she bound. When Duchamp published a book about her collection in 1956, he noted that it wasn’t a formal library. “It is more like a diary: the art and letters diary of Mary Louise Reynolds’ thirty year life in Paris.”

Though she was entrenched in the lives of celebrated artists of interwar Paris, Reynolds remains something of an obscure figure. Her collection, partly exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago alongside Kahlo’s work, preserves her role and her artistry.

“How intimate she was with the artery-stream of Paris, in the pulse of its creators, major and minor,” Flanner wrote to Reynolds’s brother. “There was something immediate in her sense of appreciation, she seemed to be right at the side of writers and artists as they became themselves, so she was a continuous witness. I loved Mary dearly; her gayety, the special timbre of her voice, her laughter, her smile which was often so contemplative. Oh, she was a captivating woman.”

“Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds,” curated by Caitlin Haskell with Tamar Kharatishvili and Alivé Piliado, is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 29 to July 13, 2025

Read more of our Women’s History Month coverage here.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

Emmanuel Di Donna has cultivated a unique presence in the blue-chip art world, standing out for his scholarly interest in Surrealism. He began his career at Sotheby’s, where he eventually climbed to worldwide vice-chairman, and went on to establish his own New York gallery in 2010. That gallery is known for organizing just two exhibitions annually, both of them deeply researched. These exhibitions are not about mere commercial success. Instead, Di Donna intends them as a way of contributing to the broader art historical narrative.

Focused mainly on the secondary market, Di Donna’s gallery distinguishes itself by showcasing Surrealists who are lesser known to those outside academia. His 2019 show “Surrealism in Mexico,” for example, explored a group of artists who, during the turbulent years of World War II, left Europe and found a new artistic home in Mexico. The exhibition featured a number of works that are now considered major contributions to the Surrealist movement, including a Leonora Carrington auction record that recently sold at Sotheby’s for $28.5 million, setting a new record for her. Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon, and Bridget Tichenor all featured in that show alongside Carrington. Those artists, who were under-recognized at the time, later appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Di Donna’s current show, “Hallowed Ground,” examines the work of four Surrealists from disparate cultures, Yves Tanguy from France, Wifredo Lam and Agustín Cárdenas from Cuba, and Alicia Penalba from Argentina. Each came to Paris to find inspiration, develop their practices, and ultimately find their voices. While those practices are different, all four artists shared an interest in squaring their respective cultures with modernist styles coming out of Paris. The show is one of the many staged this year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto.

ARTnews spoke recently with Di Donna about his entrée into the Surrealist world, his thoughts about the market today, and his latest exhibition. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

How did you become so passionate about Surrealism? How did you build your expertise in that area?

I discovered Surrealism when I did my master’s at the Courtauld Institute. I did thesis on Kandinsky, and then before I finished my master’s, I got hired by Sotheby’s to take care of the Juliet Man Ray estate in Paris. I was working with with Andrew Strauss, who was my boss from 1994 to 2000, in Paris. The mandate was to take everything that was in the apartment to storage and see what was there, what was worthwhile. We started with 2,000 items and eventually organized a sale of 500 works in London in 1995. It was a white glove sale, which means that 100 percent sold. Starting Surrealism with Man Ray is quite interesting, because it’s Surrealism in its broadest sense.

From 1995 to 2000, I was a specialist in Paris dealing with Impressionist and modern art. Yes, I dealt with Surrealism, but I was also working with Monets and Pissarros. In December 2000, we organized the first auction dedicated to Surrealism at Sotheby’s. We had a separate catalog and were given free reign in terms of what we could do. We threw away the corporate standards, created this fun catalog, and organized an exhibition in Paris. The whole gallery was pink. It was a really, really fun out-of-the-box project that kind of cemented my passion for this field where you can let your imagination run free and deal with very varied group of artists from very different backgrounds. What’s truly fascinating is that I think it is the only movement that’s still alive today, in a way. Young artists are still looking at Surrealism. And there is still a lot to say, a lot to explore, a lot to explain, because Surrealism is not simple. It’s a very intellectual movement. 

There’s so much focus on those kind of big brand artists like Magritte, Dalí, and now Carrington, but I get the sense this is just the tip of the iceberg. What are we missing out on?

The market is missing a lot. With the exhibitions I’ve been doing over the years, I’m trying to show the universal nature of Surrealism. We think of Paris in the ’20s, which was obviously catalyst for all those artists coming from different places, from Spain, from England, Cuba, coming together with the avant-garde. But Surrealism is a very broad field. The Met exhibition three years ago [“Surrealism Beyond Borders,” a survey that globalized Surrealism] showed how wide the movement was, how international. The market has been focused for years on some key figures like Magritte and Dalí. But recently, there’s been a renewed interest in female Surrealists like Carrington or Valentine Hugo. Through the exhibition that we have at the gallery now, I think you see the plurality and the richness of that field. There’s a lot of amazing stories—and there’s still a lot to be to be told. I don’t think you can do that with Cubism.

Right, Surrealism is perhaps almost eternal, or at least our conceptions of it are still evolving.

And that’s because it’s about human emotions. It’s about dreams. It’s about sex. It’s anchored in the human psyche, you know. We can go explore Mars or the map the Moon, but will we ever be able to fully explore the human psyche?

In terms of “Hallowed Ground,” how did you choose these four artists, and what was the process of getting the pictures?

It all starts with an idea, right? You’ve got to dream those shows. That’s the reason why I have a gallery—I’m not just a private dealer, doing deals. I enjoy that mental exercise and the creative process of putting those artists together. I’m interested in creating discussions around these artists. I’m limited with the amount of works that I can put together, of course, but I love doing those smaller shows that can, one hopes, give impetus to a museum to pick up the idea and do something bigger, something deeper. My process involves a lot of research in books, in our database. I think often about what we need in order to tell a specific story. And after that, we go find those works. You knock on doors. You ask nicely. But I found over the years, when you have a good project, and a good track record of putting good shows together, clients are pleased to participate. After all, it’s to the benefit of the art and the artist, and of course those who own the pictures. At the end of the day, I build up prices, for other people. But I think it’s very important that work that is not done by most galleries. The packaging, the explanation, the context, is still very important. When people don’t know what they’re looking at or why it’s a problem.

I’d love to hear your kind of thoughts on the Surrealism market today, which obviously has seen a huge jump. Both the Magritte and the Carrington coming up for sale in November have been through your gallery. What do you think accounts for that the popularity of these Surrealist works that have been coming to market?

It’s crazy to think how much the Surrealism market has grown. René Magritte’s L’empire des Lumières (1961) sold for $79.8 million at Sotheby’s in 2022. The previous record, made in 2018, was for $26.8 million, also at Sotheby’s, for the artist’s 1937 picture Le Principe du Plaisir. This is a direct result of interest, of good museum shows and gallery shows. Then a few good paintings come to auction and trigger the attention of collectors. It’s a whole universe that helps foster interest in a collectors mind. If there’s no exhibition, if there’s nothing being done, then it’s difficult.

Sotheby’s will sell Leonora Carrington’s 1951 sculpture La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman) this November at a modern art evening sale, where it will head to auction with an estimate of $5 million to $7 million.

“This is her greatest sculpture,” Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of Impressionist and modern art for the Americas, told ARTnews.

La Grande Dame is made of carved and polychrome wood that has been painted with imagery alluding to a rich tapestry of cultural references, including ancient folklore, witchcraft, and an Egyptian creation myth. Most recently, the six-foot-tall sculpture was exhibited as part of the 2022 exhibition “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity,” which was staged at Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection during the Biennale, a show that borrowed its name from Carrington’s writings. At the Museum Barberini, La Grande Dame was displayed next to Carrington’s painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945), which sold for $28.5 million this year, setting a record for the artist.

“We really get to show this completely distinct dimension of her as a sculptor, which is a huge part of her artistic identity,” Dawes said. He added that the sale of La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman) deserved extra attention because of the work’s rarity—Carrington produced few sculptures, and this one has been accepted as a bona fide work by her, unlike some other three-dimensional pieces commonly attributed to this Surrealist. “I’m really happy and satisfied and excited that that we were able to find something of this quality and significance that can kind of match the energy, hopefully, to an extent of Dagobert, and continue that momentum.”

La Grande Dame also has a notable provenance: it was owned for years by Edward James, who patronized many of the Surrealists and even befriended some of them, including Carrington.

Carrington’s market is fast growing as the history of Surrealism is rewritten to account for more women involved in the movement, hence her record earlier this year. “There’s so much interest in demand for Carrington that was unmet,” Dawes said, “and I think it kind of spilled out onto that painting in that moment.”

Museums and other institutions are also expected to be among the bidders for La Grande Dame. Dawes also noted the wide, global relevance of the artist’s identity and the sculpture itself. Carrington was “a British artist working in Mexico using Egyptian and Celtic and pre -Columbian iconography, creating something that’s wholly fantastical and original,” he said. “It’s awesome and very relevant across the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a lot of institutional activity.”

Swirling coils, dancing legs, twitching starfish, and thrown dice are a few of the beguiling visuals in Man Ray: Return to Reason, a recently released collection of four experimental shorts in the oeuvre of the seminal Dada and Surrealist artist.

Last May, the Cannes Film Festival debuted the newly restored 4K versions of the films to honor the centennial of Man Ray’s entry into filmmaking. Following the North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last fall, a wider release by distributor Janus Films begins this month, just as Surrealism celebrates its 100th anniversary.

Le Retour à la Raison (1923), Emak-Bakia (1926), L’Étoile de Mer (1928), and Les Mystères du Château du Dé (1929) comprise these wondrous 70 minutes that are now accompanied by a hypnotic avant-garde score, replete with guitar riffs, percussion, and droning synthesizers, by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan of SQÜRL.

Created two years after his move to Paris, Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason) was produced with the encouragement of poet Tristan Tzara for a Dada evening of performance. Man Ray, adapting his process for creating cameraless photographs (photograms he eponymously dubbed “rayographs”), placed objects directly onto celluloid strips and briefly exposed them to light. He fudged the editing by gluing strips together. In his 1963 autobiography, Self Portrait, Man Ray wrote of his early films, “My curiosity was aroused by the idea of putting into motion some of the results I had obtained in still photography.”

For Le Retour’s opening image, he sprinkled salt and pepper on film “like a cook preparing a roast,” as he once put it. Seasonings, dress pins, and thumbtacks pulsate on screen, sometimes reversed as film negatives. These compositions are interspersed with footage such as a revolving carousel’s lights and a woman’s nude torso turning in front of a window. Despite his attempt to adhere to a credo of randomness, Man Ray’s unrelated shots belie his aesthetic attention to line, pattern, and movement.

At its 1923 premiere, his inexpertly mounted film broke twice, causing an uproar. By the principles of Dada: a success.

Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone) similarly is the result of playful experimentation with professional camera equipment, a turntable, crystals, lighting, and distorting mirrors. According to Man Ray’s remarks at the screening, the film was “purely optical, made to appeal only to the eyes.”

A vibrating pattern of white on black is followed by a shot of daisies, alternating between the real and the abstract. The legs of model and artist Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray’s lover and muse who posed for many of his iconic works such as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Noire et Blanche (1926), appear in t-strap shoes dancing the Charleston while a Black man’s hand strums a banjo. A crossdresser finishes grooming and looks out at the ocean’s lapping waves. Soon, the camera rotates to invert sea and sky, an unusual move for Ray, who more often used a static camera to capture motion, akin to enlivening still pictures. A bit of trickery ends the film as Kiki awakens to reveal that her closed lids had been painted to look like eyes, echoing the film’s opening of Man Ray’s eye looking through a camera lens.

The most cohesive film, L’Etoile de Mer (The Star of the Sea), features a starfish with undulating appendages, providing an erotic motif amid dream-like sequences. An interpretation of Surrealist writings by Robert Desnos, it also stars Kiki.

Early on, through what appears to be smeared glass, a man and a woman climb a staircase to a bedroom. The woman undresses seductively and lies down. Surprisingly, the man departs. In his autobiography, Ray described his process of obscuring the scene to avoid censorship by using soaked gelatin sheets as a filter, “obtaining a mottled or cathedral-glass effect through which the photography would look like sketchy drawing or painting.”

What follows is typical Surrealist delight: scenes of trains and steamships in motion, newspapers flying in the wind, a woman holding a dagger—later a double exposure with a starfish in a jar, and a second man who leads the woman away from the first, to his dismay.

And finally, there is Man Ray’s most elaborate short, Les Mystères du Chateâu du Dé (The Mysteries of the Castle of the Dice), commissioned by Charles de Noailles, one of the day’s leading patrons of avant-garde film, to record his mansion in the South of France and his patrician guests. With the payment, Ray bought the fastest film and newest lenses available to realize his vision for the project. The blocky exterior of the château informed the theme of the film, which drew inspiration from Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.”

The film opens with two men in a Parisian café rolling a pair of dice to determine their actions. Over a bumpy road, they drive to a gray cement estate. Using a dolly, Man Ray provides sweeping shots that examine the various angles of the building, the garden’s outdoor sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and the rest of de Noailles’s extensive art collection.

Back inside the château, guests arrive and cast the die to determine their recreational activities in and around the well-equipped pool and gymnasium. Everyone wears face obscuring silk-stocking masks “for mystery and anonymity,” according to Man Ray. In striped swimsuits, the guests dive, juggle underwater, and flip into headstands as sunlight casts pleasing shadows around the pool. When night falls, a couple tussle in the garden and then freeze into place, posed like statues in a tableau, as the suspenseful soundtrack builds. A wooden hand holds a large pair of dice in the final closeup shot.

What connects these four films, other than their maker? Serendipity and the interdisciplinary art world of Paris in the 1920s. Through mesmerizing images and unexpected drama, Ray created magic in his filmmaking—another successful medium for the prolific and influential artist.

Read more about “Impressionism & Surrealism, Revisited” here. 

Leonora Carrington’s 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for $28.5 million with fees on Wednesday night during Sotheby’s evening sale for modern and contemporary art, setting a record for the Surrealist artist at auction.

The painting, carrying a $12 million–$18 million estimate, hit that price after 10 minutes of bidding. Argentinian developer and businessman Eduardo F. Costantini—who was in the room—bid against buyers on the phone with Alejandra Rossetti, senior vice president for business development for the auction house in Miami, and Jen Hua, Sotheby’s deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Asia.

“An iconic painting, The Distractions of Dagobert, is one the most admired works in the history of surrealism and an unparalleled masterpiece of Latin American art. I was the underbidder when she reached the artist’s record 30 years ago and tonight once again, we made a new auction record! This masterpiece will be part of a collection where amongst other two important works by Remedios Varo and another record breaking  Frida Kahlo are also found,” Constantini said in a statement after the sale.

Costantini is an ARTnews Top 200 collector known for founding Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. In 2001, he donated over 220 works of Latin American art to the museum, including numerous pieces by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Costantini has been known to set records for Latin American artists by purchasing key works at auction.

In 2020, Costantini set records when he bought works by Remedios Varo and Wilfredo Lam. In 2020, at Sotheby’s, he purchased the latter’s Omi Obini (1945) for $9.6 million, making it the highest price ever achieved for a work by a Latin American artist at the time. Connstantini then broke that record in 2021 when he bought Frida Kahlo’s Diego y yo (Diego and I) at Sotheby’s for $34.9 million.

The price achieved for the Carrington on Wednesday far surpassed her previous record at auction, which was set two years ago for The Garden of Paracelsus (1957), when it sold for $3.2 million.

“The recent surge of interest in previously overlooked women artists connected with the Surrealist movement marks a profoundly significant cultural shift. Leonora Carrington has proved to be a lightning rod of attention, setting the stage for Les Distractions de Dagobert, the apotheosis of Carrington’s oeuvre, to take its place as a masterpiece of 20th-century art,” Allegra Bettini, the head of Sotheby’s modern art evening sales in New York, said in a statement prior to the sale.

As Bettini noted, the upsurge in prices for Carrington, who was born in England and based in Mexico for much of her career, tracks with a surge in interest in women Surrealists, a trend best exemplified by the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. That show was titled “The Milk of Dreams,” after a book of the same name by Carrington.

Les Distractions de Dagobert was featured in the exhibition “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanced Modernity,” which was on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, also in 2022.